[T]he United States of America will not stand idly by in the fact of actions that undermine global peace and security. So I’ve taken this decision with the confidence that action is necessary, and that we will not be acting alone.

Um, Mr. President, you did stand idly by, for weeks and this idiot slaughtered his own people. This “sitskrieg” has been going on for over a month. And look, I’m not saying that there is no argument for staying out of it. I personally think we should have done something long ago. But I respect the other side. But I don’t respect any person pretending we have done anything but sit on our hands up until now, okay? There has to be a little truth, okay?

Ah, but then again, this is the same administration that was recently caught understating how much the deficit would be (that is the rate of increase of our debt), and falsely claimed that we would not be adding to the debt, resulting in this poor nominee to the OMB being put in the difficult position of having to tell us the Obama administration was lying to us:

So that was quote one. And then there was this, from the same transcript:

Muammar Qadhafi clearly lost the confidence of his own people and the legitimacy to lead.

Um, wait a minute, Mr. President… Exactly when did Gaddafi have legitimacy? A dictator is illegitimate every day of his rule.

And mind you, this wasn’t the first time he said, that. He said the same thing, here, about two weeks ago. And someone—I forgot who—noted the incorrectness of that statement, and I let it slide because I figured it was probably just a one-off mistake. But no, apparently this is the Obama doctrine: sometimes a dictator is the legitimate ruler of a nation—a point of view that should never be held by the leader of a free nation.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: Charlie Martin puts this story in some perspective. Best line: “But it’s also like saying ‘the truck reached 40 miles an hour, enough to kill people.’ It doesn’t mean ‘people are dying’, it means ‘get out of the way of trucks’.”

I have taken some flak for being, well… pessimistic about the nuclear disaster over in Japan. It is fair to say that I always believed it was worse than they were telling us. My gut feeling all along was they were downplaying the whole thing and bluntly in my experience my “gut feelings” are usually right. Take for instance this report:

The boss of the company behind the devastated Japanese nuclear reactor today broke down in tears – as his country finally acknowledged the radiation spewing from the over-heating reactors and fuel rods was enough to kill some citizens

Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency admitted that the disaster was a level 5, which is classified as a crisis causing ‘several radiation deaths’ by the UN International Atomic Energy.

Officials said the rating was raised after they realised the full extent of the radiation leaking from the plant. They also said that 3 per cent of the fuel in three of the reactors at the Fukushima plant had been severely damaged, suggesting those reactor cores have partially melted down.

After Tokyo Electric Power Company Managing Director Akio Komiri cried as he left a conference to brief journalists on the situation at Fukushima, a senior Japanese minister also admitted that the country was overwhelmed by the scale of the tsunami and nuclear crisis.

He said officials should have admitted earlier how serious the radiation leaks were.

Now that doesn’t mean everyone should be freaking out, and it doesn’t mean that suddenly we have to stop nuclear power (although I give it about a 50% chance that Obama will announce a nuclear moratorium similar to the drilling moratorium). Yes, radiation is scary, because it is hard to assess the danger of it, but we have to learn to think rationally about it—especially if we are ever going to shift away from our dependence on foreign oil. At the very least any person who says they don’t want us to use nuclear power needs to answer this question: if not nuclear power, then what do we use instead? Environmentalists don’t like nuclear power oil, coal, complain that dams are ruining habitats, and, hell, the late Ted Kennedy opposed the rational use of wind power for years because supposedly it would harm his view and thus his property values. Obviously not all power sources are created equal, but we can’t just pretend that every possible option is too awful to contemplate (although you often suspect that some environmentalists really just want none of the above, hoping for us to return to the wild or something. The rest of us think that is insanity).

In a related story we have this story discussing some of what led to this nuclear disaster:

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

As usual, you are positively encouraged to engage in sock puppetry in this thread. The usual rules apply.

Please, be sure to switch back to your regular handle when commenting on other threads. I have made that mistake myself, a lot.

And remember: the worst sin you can commit on this thread is not being funny.

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And for a little Friday frivolity, we have this clip from the New York Post where they find Andrew Dice Clay, try to get him to talk about Gilbert Gotfired Gottfried getting fired by Aflac because of some jokes on twitter. But Clay doesn’t seem very interested in that, and instead breaks off into a rant on Charlie Sheen. There is no language warning, here, because all of it is bleeped out anyway, so that by the end you think it might be Morse code. Sure, his Foul Fonzie act was old more than a decade ago, and he’s just saying what everyone’s thinking, with extra curse words, but it’s still funny and cathartic, imho:

Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi issued a temporary restraining order Friday, barring the publication of a controversial new law that would sharply curtail collective bargaining for public employees.

Sumi’s order will prevent Secretary of State Doug La Follette from publishing the law until she can rule on the merits of the case. Dane County Ismael Ozanne is seeking to block the law because he says a legislative committee violated the state’s open meetings law.

Which sounds strange to me. How can one law be invalidated because it supposedly violated another law? I don’t know their state laws, but typically the only actual limits on lawmaking authority is found in the state constitution, or federal law. Any open meetings law would be a legislative rule typically left entirely to the legislature to enforce—or not enforce—as they see fit.

But that is said without seeing the opinion or knowing much about state law. What is typical might not be the case in this state. And obviously I can’t say the judge is right or wrong until I at least see the opinion and kick the tires a little. After all, I have repeatedly pointed out that the quality of reporting on legal issues is nothing less than awful.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

You might remember Shahbaz Bhatti. He was the Pakistani Catholic and cabinet member who was gunned down for opposing his nation’s blasphemy laws. Here’s video where he tells us he is ready to die for what he believed in.

Well, one time Martin Luther King reminded us that “God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.” While his death has not yet torn down the blasphemy laws that encouraged his murderers to believe it is ever right to kill a man for what he believes, it is already believed that he has shamed much of the world away from support of such laws:

Infamous Anti-Blasphemy Resolution Doomed by Bhatti Assassination

March 17, 2011 4:12 P.M.

By Nina Shea

Since 1998, a U.N. resolution to universalize Islamic rules against blasphemy, introduced by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has been annually adopted in the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, or both.

This year, however, this atrocious “Defamation of Religions” resolution appears to be a non-starter. A high-level State Department official has told me that the March 2 assassination of Pakistani minister for minorities Shahbaz Bhatti, who had sought repeal of that country’s blasphemy law, has doomed the anti-blasphemy push in the Human Rights Council, now meeting in Geneva.

Apparently, neither Pakistan’s delegate — who frequently introduced the resolution in the past and was consistently one of its most enthusiastic supporters — nor any other OIC envoy will table it at the council’s current session.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: I got morbidly curious and looked up the rules on entries for the Pulitzer Prize and, judging by this page and this one, I think maybe Ann would qualify. And she certainly would deserve it.

Update (II): Deroy Murdock has more on the threats made in Wisconsin and notices the similarity to Islamofascist language.

Update (III): Over at Big Government, an interview with Jim Shankman. My favorite part: “Shankman believes reports of thuggery and other misbehavior by Leftist protesters in Wisconsin are ‘all over-blown.'” He reminds me of the Islamofascists who threaten to murder anyone who claims Islam is a violent religion. His irony detector is broken.

Well, you had to wonder how long it would be before the deranged left decided Ann Althouse was the enemy. Althouse has two posts as of now from a Jim Shankman (here and here). My only peeve is that it’s not obvious how she received these threatening documents and I wish she would fill that in a little more.

Of course Althouse’s sin has been to make the protesters in Wisconsin look bad. How has she done that? Mostly by picking up a video camera and letting them be themselves.

The creepy thing, reading the screed sent to Althouse is its familiarity. As many here know, I participated in the Everyone Draw Mohammed protests last year and I didn’t mention it much but yeah, now and then I got death threats. Generally my reaction was to delete it and let them know they have been reported to the FBI. But here you can see a recent example that I haven’t gotten around to deleting yet. I don’t want to make too much of it. I’m not trying to make myself out to be courageous or anything. Seriously, I believe what this really is, is impotent rage. I am fully convinced that these guys are just idiots in their pajamas, in their mother’s basement, who think they can intimidate us this way but are in reality incapable of performing.

But this Anti-Althouse screed has a certain “American Taliban” kind of feel, especially in the notion that somehow because she had the temerity to show the world how these idiots really behave she has to leave town. If the man was serious, he is proposing a very real totalitarianism on American soil. Hopefully he has the same performance issues as the idiots who threaten me.

We all know that in the wake of the Gabby Giffords shooting the left tried to tar the entire right as “uncivil” in its dialogue which somehow led a communist to attack Giffords (I think the logic of the argument goes something like the business plan of the infamous Underwear Gnomes on South Park). Indeed I threw up in my mouth a little when I read that the University of Arizona was creating a National Institute for Civil Discourse in honor of Ms. Giffords. By comparison, Judge Roll will get a much more fitting tribute: a courthouse named after him.

We knew at the time that the party of the Teamsters were just blowing smoke when they pretended to be committed to civility. The events of the last month only verify that.

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Also you can witness Ann Althouse talking to Megyn Kelly about a video she shot recently:

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